Though some of the 20th century’s finest translator poets have gone before him, David Hinton has managed to find his own way through the rivers and mountains of medieval Chinese verse re-imagining the poems themselves as subtle soundscapes suspended in us. Hinton’s accomplishment is quiet but clear: His translations yield the gentlest pleasure in the mouth when read aloud, echoing that fusion of essence and sense, being and nonbeing that lies at the heart of the understanding from which these poems emerge.

—Judges’ Citation for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award

Wang An-shih

by Wang An-shih

Wang An-shih

Wang An-shih (1021–1086) was a remarkable figure—not only one of the great Song Dynasty poets but also the most influential and controversial statesman of his time. Wang rose to the position of Prime Minister, where he instituted a controversial system of radically egalitarian social reforms in an effort to improve the lives of China’s peasants. Wang then left politics and retired to a reclusive artistic and spiritual life of self-cultivation.

Wang spent those later years practicing Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism and wandering the mountains around his home, and that Taoist civilization of the rivers-and-mountains realm shapes his poems. His writing has won him wide acclaim across the centuries in China and beyond.

Wang An-shih (1021–1086) was a remarkable figure—not only one of the great Song Dynasty poets but also the most influential and controversial statesman of his time. Wang rose to the position of Prime Minister, where he instituted a controversial system of radically egalitarian social reforms in an effort to improve the lives of China’s peasants. Wang then left politics and retired to a reclusive artistic and spiritual life of self-cultivation. Wang spent those later years practicing Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism and wandering the mountains around his home, and that Taoist civilization of the rivers-and-mountains realm shapes his poems.…

Wang’s poetry possesses the power to transport the reader to another time and place…

—John Bradley, Rain Taxi

Though some of the 20th century’s finest translator poets have gone before him, David Hinton has managed to find his own way through the rivers and mountains of medieval Chinese verse re-imagining the poems themselves as subtle soundscapes suspended in us. Hinton’s accomplishment is quiet but clear: His translations yield the gentlest pleasure in the mouth when read aloud, echoing that fusion of essence and sense, being and nonbeing that lies at the heart of the understanding from which these poems emerge.

—Judges’ Citation for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award

David Hinton’s music is subtle, modulated, and does not slacken with either contemporary or classic. He has listened to the individual tone of each poet, and his craft is equal to his perception.

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”